Ok, thanks Orachin, I re-read your post and tried it out in a game and I see how that works now.
I still don't think that's the best way this can be done, and it certainly doesn't address my concerns.
I watched the podcast thing where Brad was gushing over how in this game, you play the army, not the unit or the control group, and about how awesome that was not to have to micromanage stuff.
With the system the way it is, I still have to micromanage the composition of my army. I have to select it, hit the build button, look at what units are still in the army, and then start adding things to get it back up to the order of battle that I want it to be at. This really should be automated.
In the regular US Army, there's a thing called the MTOE, which stands for Modified Table of Organization and Equipment. It's basically the cookie cutter document that defines what personnel, of what rank, what skills, and with what equipment each standard unit is to be equipped. Since every standard unit is based off the same MTOE, it's easy to know what each unit will have, more or less, because the MTOE will be the same for each unit of a given type.
To extend that concept to this game, if you really want this game to be about the army, not the unit, I should be able to go to an Army interface where I define what an army should consist of, and then simply hit a button and say "make me this, and assign it to this control group." Then available factory production goes to filling out that organization as I've defined it. I could have one or more army templates that I create, and "instantiate" whichever one I want in a given situation. I establish a rally point for that army, and as factory production fills it out, the units gather there.
As it is, I still have to build some units first, manually group them into an army, manually assign then a control group, manually add a T2 unit, only then do I get to go in and tell the game what units I'd like added to this army. I'm still micromanaging things to an extent that I shouldn't have to. Also, what if all my factories are currently working on requests for another army, and I want to make a new one? The units are rolling off the line already pre-assigned to an army, but I sitll have to go manually round some up, group them up into a separate new army, assign the control group, find a T2 unit from somewhere to assign to it, go into the build menu, etc.
And then, as units die, the army gets smaller and smaller until I manually go in and bring up the build menu again, take stock of what's left, and manually request my reinforcements. This is no way to control an army. Once I've established my baseline template for the order of battle of this army, the AI should be smart enough to automatically request reinforcements for any unit type that is now deficient in the army compared to the army template.
